Mcmafia, p.32
McMafia, page 32
When he was six years old, David Soares immigrated to Pawtucket, a small mill town in Rhode Island, three years after Rockefeller had promulgated his New York drug laws. Soares had come from Bravo, the most westerly of the CapeVerde Islands, the Portuguese-Creole-speaking community off Africa’s west coast, the most famous inhabitant of which is the singer Cesaria Evoria. Growing up in a poor black neighborhood, he developed an understanding of the mechanisms of deprivation and its consequences. But thanks to his exceptional intelligence, his experience as a second-generation immigrant unfolded as a fairy tale and he ended up winning a scholarship to study law at Cornell.
Soon after he joined the DA’s office in Albany, one of President Clinton’s initiatives made money available to set up the office of a community prosecutor whose job was to liaise with leaders in those areas of the city where there were high crime rates. Nobody wanted the job, but Soares was the obvious candidate. Although 30 percent of the city’s population is African American or Hispanic, he was the first and only assistant prosecutor from the minority communities. “Naturally the melanin content of my skin made me an instant expert in the area of community prosecution,” he remarked with a wry smile.
And before long, his experience in working in the inner city challenged his assumptions about law enforcement and about the Rockefeller laws in particular. “I would go to court every morning, prosecuting an individual every day, believing that the job I was doing was going to make that corner a clean corner and a safer corner. But every single day I’m going into the court and I’m prosecuting this kid that I saw arrested on the block and I’m coming back and there’s a new kid, same age, same complexion, doing the same thing. And it was just incredible that here we were doing the same thing every day—locking up and destroying entire communities. Meanwhile on the other side, I’m watching law enforcement and they’re coming in saying here’s a twenty-dollar street rip—what we call a twenty-buck control buy. We were shooting fish in a barrel. This was supposed to be good law enforcement work? Resolving problems? Cleaning up communities? No—this was a factory! This was a moneymaking operation—a collars for dollars scheme that I was not going to be part of anymore. I made my stand because I was tired of watching people on the corners getting pummeled. It’s the same feeling, I imagine, as grabbing slaves and putting them on a ship.”
Perhaps the most terrifying statistic of all that Soares uncovered was that in Albany County (minority population 13 percent) more than 95 percent of imprisoned drug law offenders were black or Hispanic. Whichever way you look at the figure, it can mean only one thing—something is rotten in the state.
Special Agent Matthew Fogg knew that he had to be careful but found it difficult holding his tongue. Ever since he testified in Congress in 1989 that his boss, Ronald Hein, was a racist and should not be appointed to the prestigious position of U.S. Marshal for the D.C. Superior Court, he had encountered difficulties in his career. Despite his being an outcast among his fellow police officers, Fogg’s courage in speaking out as a whistle-blower was eventually vindicated in 1998 when a jury awarded him $4 million plus full back pay in his suit against Janet Reno, then U.S. attorney general, and the Department of Justice. The court concluded that not only had Fogg been the victim of racial discrimination at the hands of his bosses but that the U.S. Marshals Service was institutionally racist.
The landmark ruling was neither the beginning nor the end of Fogg’s determination to highlight corruption and racial discrimination both within the ranks of America’s law enforcement agencies and in their application of the law in various communities. Fogg made a lot of enemies. On one occasion, he was set up by his own colleagues during an operation to arrest a fugitive in Baltimore and was almost killed. That was during the early nineties when he had been seconded to the DEA from the U.S. Marshals Service, where he served as a deputy. His job at the DEA was to supervise a metropolitan task force that would carry out drug sweeps in the largest cities across the country.
Fogg is a tall, tough-looking guy, but his speech is modest and gentle even when his anger quickens. Even now that he is in his fifties and despite a life of hard knocks, he still seems bewildered at how unfair and unjust the world can be. “Over the course of my career, I’ve been responsible for locking up somewhere in the region of 2,000 fugitives,” he told me at an office in Washington. “’Cause I was involved in dragnets—we swept everything moving in all the major cities around the country. At the task force, we’d fix the operation with the local police department and supply them with federal funds for it, give ’em overtime and everything. We’d give the dragnets fancy names like Operation Gunsmoke or Operation Sunrise and it was a ninety days deal. In that ninety days you go hog wild on locking up as many folk on anything you could get. But of course we would concentrate on the urban areas mainly where African Americans and people of color were. Eighty-five percent and more of the folk we arrested were black or Hispanic.”
Dispirited at hauling in hundreds of men and women from his own community, Fogg came up with a new proposal for his boss at the DEA. “I suggested we go out to Potomac, Maryland, and to Springfield, to places where whites live, and out to Alexandria, because our job was to find the drugs and white folk do drugs too. The DEA ASAC, the [assistant] special agent in charge, got hold of me and said, ‘We gotta talk about this.’ He said, ‘Fogg, you’re right. People do drugs everywhere. White folks do drugs too. But, buddy—we start going out into those areas with the task force, those people know judges, lawyers, politicians, and let me tell you something, they’ll shut us down and there goes your overtime. We’ll go after the weakest link instead.”
The discussion degenerated into an argument. “‘This is selective enforcement,’ I told him. ‘Man,’ I said, ‘we even got white guys in the force coming up to us saying we’re doing too many black guys.’ Me and the other black guys on the force, we’d talk about this all the time, but we never did anything about it. And then I realized. Here we are, part of the plantation, doing the massa’s bidding.”
Because of the system of financial incentives that is built into the war on drugs, and because of the protection from prosecution, as described by Fogg, that white communities enjoy, this war in the United States is waged against blacks and Hispanics. In light of his experiences, Matthew Fogg is now convinced that the strategy is designed as an institutional tool that is used to control African American communities and limit their economic and social opportunities. This is taking conspiracy too far, but there should be no doubt that the war on drugs inflicts massively disproportionate damage on America’s underprivileged minority communities. The ability of the criminal justice system to levy crushing penalties of imprisonment and for law enforcement officers to be rewarded for the numbers charged and convicted is an open invitation for corruption.
Fogg concluded that the harm done to African Americans by the policing of drugs far outweighed the harm caused by the drugs themselves. There is now a growing number of former law enforcement officers from federal and state agencies, including the DEA, who like Matthew Fogg speak out in favor of the decriminalization or legalization of narcotics in the United States. And like most of these men and women, Matthew Fogg does not use drugs. He discourages their use among his community. But although in the late 1990s he represented a growing constituency that has support among members of both Democratic and Republican parties, no single politician seeking office ever dared challenge the orthodoxy of the war on drugs in public. However compelling the arguments for a liberalization of America’s drug wars might be, in the hothouse of Washington and state politics, it is a third-rail issue—touch it and you’re dead.
That was until David Soares came along.
In the late 1990s, working as an assistant DA and using his office of community prosecutor, Soares embarked on projects to try to clean up the West Hill inner-city area, the focus of Albany’s narcotics trade. His first focus was on the environment. “There’s a reason people don’t deal drugs in the suburbs in front of nice fresh-cut grass. It’s because there’s something about the environment that sends out a signal to the offender that says, ‘This type of behavior is not acceptable here.’ But when you have boarded-up buildings, when you have overgrown bushes and cars abandoned in lots, it sends a message that says, ‘Anything is tolerated here.’ We set about removing some of those obstacles—trimming the trees, cutting the grass, and we were using offenders in bringing that about, while also instilling in them the idea that this is their neighborhood. They began to see that they were not cleaning the broken glass and syringes off a basketball court as punishment but because their little brothers and little sisters would be playing here later on. In less than a year, we were able to drive down the emergency calls without increasing the number of arrests.”
Soares’s success didn’t just interfere with the drug-dealing network; it started to irritate a political network—a very powerful network indeed. “This became an issue for my boss at the time, who would sit in his office and talk for hours about what I’m doing wrong. I was, for example, getting trash cans for people who wanted trash cans. What they were concerned about was that I was attempting to destroy a system. If you were a resident and you wanted a trash can in front of your house, you would call the committee men, who would then contact the deputy ward leader, who would then contact the ward leader, who would then let the mayor know that there was a trash can needed. They would inform you who got you the trash can and they would inform you about what you needed to do to repay this. That’s been the political culture—it’s called The Machine.”
The Machine reacts poorly to those who challenge its authority. Soares’s bosses started withdrawing resources and support staff. Before long, Soares found he was no longer able to do his job. He was treading water with no prospect of advancement in Albany. Once he had disturbed The Machine, he could expect no mercy, especially not from his boss, the DA Paul Clyne, member of one of the most influential Democratic families in the city and an unbending supporter of the Rockefeller drug laws.
Soares decided to sell up and move to Atlanta, a magnet for thousands of middle-class blacks from the Northeast. “‘Do you really want to move?’ my wife asked me. And I said, ‘Yes.’ She accused me of running away like some kid from school. ‘If these guys had been at school in Pawtucket, you would have punched ’em.’ She brought back my little Pawtucket spirit.”
The next day, Soares gave the train to Georgia a miss and walked into Paul Clyne’s office to inform the DA that he intended to run against him in the forthcoming Democratic primary. “The meeting lasted seven minutes,” Soares recalls. “He laughed the first five and he then fired me in the next two.”
The Machine, a corrupt Democratic Party operation similar to the Daley dynasty’s fiefdom in Chicago, has always governed Albany, and there was one community who had never been granted membership. “The party appoints the judges; the party appoints the chief of police, the mayors, everyone here—the legislators all come out of the same institution. But there’s only one African American judge and then there’s me—only two in any policy-making positions in this county. But the issue of race has never been dealt with here—they live there and we live here. They’ll tell you that they employ a lot of African Americans in the city. What they don’t tell you is that they’re all picking up trash!”
In the autumn of 2004, Soares stood against Clyne in the Democratic primary and then again in the election to the DA’s office, as Clyne stood against him as an independent. Soares had been out on the stump, holding rallies and knocking on doors in all communities throughout Albany County, although whites made up more than 80 percent of the electorate. Soares placed reform of the Rockefeller drug laws at the center of his campaign. “The Rockefeller drug laws smack of everything that is offensive,” he said at the time. “The image of the criminal justice system is Themis, and she has a scale, a blindfold, and a sword. It is supposed to be just. If we lose faith in the criminal justice system, then what do we have? We have chaos. The Rockefeller drug laws are offensive to the image of Themis. We know that the drug law acts negatively on African Americans and Hispanics so disproportionately that the fact that it is still on the books today makes you wonder. I don’t like to look at this in terms of race so much, but to say here is an issue that is important to everyone. Addiction is something that affects everyone, whether it is crack cocaine or alcohol. Most people, whether it be immediate family or a cousin, have that experience; they know what damage addiction does to families. So to have a system that treats addiction in the way that it does, so disproportionately, is wrong.”
In both the primary and in the main election, Soares whipped Clyne and all other opponents. His election destroyed the political consensus in New York State. On the eve of his election victory in November 2004, Soares said, “It is unquestionable that…the days of this antiquated statute are numbered. The fact that the most vociferous, inflexible member of the New York State DAs Association is in jeopardy of losing his position and primarily on the issue of the Rockefeller drug laws is a moment for pause for every single elected official in the state of New York.”
It is also a message to Congress and the presidency—slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice. The funds used to sustain bureaucracies such as the DEA that prosecute the war on drugs are a drop in the ocean when compared with the gazillions that organized crime syndicates have earned because Washington is determined to drive the market underground. The social and criminal problems related to drug abuse will never go away until the state can exercise control over the industry as a whole.
And that is just in the United States. Pity those less affluent countries who fall victim to America’s war on drugs. Above all, pity Colombia.
CHAPTER 11
March of Fear
Soldiers
The road to Jamundí, fifteen miles south of Cali, is quite a tour. First I drive past the training ground of Cali America Soccer Club, owned by the Rodríguez-Orejuela clan, a.k.a. the Cali cartel. A few miles farther on, I am astonished to see a full-size bull ring belonging to the Ochoa brothers, erstwhile partners of the late Pablo Escobar in the Medellín cartel. Jamundí is a favored recreational destination for narco-traffickers (as they are universally known in Colombia), where they have built grand fincas, complete with lakes, full-size floodlit soccer pitches, indoor and outdoor pools—all on the same property. Right at the far end, the fincas stop abruptly and the modest dwellings of the impecunious Indians begin.
As the little town tails off, there is a welcoming sign at the beginning of a drive lined by tall green hedges. Underneath the words my little home: psychiatric hostel there is a phone number and an arrow pointing down the drive. Two hundred yards farther on around a couple of bends is the Little Home itself, set in delightful grounds—although the rusty green and red iron gates and the barbed-wire fencing are less welcoming.
At five-thirty on May 22, 2006, the commander of one of Colombia’s crack Special Forces units stopped his convoy of three cars at just this spot. Accompanied by nine men and a civilian informer, he emerged from his car and strolled toward the gates—the informant had assured him that there was more to My Little Home than meets the eye.
Without warning a group of uniformed men who had been lying in wait opened fire on the police unit, killing its commander instantly. Twenty-eight gunmen were hidden among the unkempt undergrowth adjacent to the drive. “We were just preparing supper at the time,” said a member of the staff at the hostel, “when all of a sudden there was this tremendous noise of gunfire from the gate.” A couple of the police officers had thrown themselves into the open drains for protection. “We heard these men screaming, saying, ‘Stop, please don’t shoot! We’re police!’ And then, ‘We have wives and children.’”
But the shooting went on for a full twenty minutes until every last policeman was dead. When a regular police team came to clean up the mess, they found that one of the attackers had made a point of placing a bullet in the back of the head of the civilian—as a message, perhaps?
Unnatural deaths like those at Jamundí are always a shock in this country but never a surprise. There is a bewildering number of potential perpetrators—a whole book’s worth of murdering acronyms has been stalking this country for thirty years, each staking its claim to political and moral superiority by means of massacre, torture, and bombings. And that’s just the freelancers. The police and the military have frequently acted as unaccountably as the traffickers, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas.
Colombia’s powerful Marxist guerrillas, the FARC, are often mentioned first as possible culprits in attacks on the military or the police such as the one in Jamundí. They certainly operate quite close to the town; they derive a large part of their income from cocaine; and they have never shied away from mounting armed assaults on government agents. As if to emphasize this, while I was visiting Jamundí, a FARC unit was busy killing six policemen on the other side of Cali with pipe bombs that they had been taught to build by members of the provisional IRA. But these days their military units rarely penetrate this far into urban areas, and the attack did not fit the profile of a FARC operation.
Then there were the local paramilitaries (known as the AUC) who often fight alongside the regular army against the FARC. Claiming to be upholders of the right to private property (especially property they have seized by intimidation and murder), many members of the AUC had disarmed in a deal brokered with the government earlier in the year, only to emerge as new organized criminal gangs in the lawless barrios that grow, tumor-like, from the nether regions of all major Colombian cities.
